Wednesday, June 11, 2014

[WoW] Illusions of Community Grandeur - Communities in Gaming

Going through University, I actually nearly switched my
major from Computer Science to Sociology. I had a fantastic professor who
really was passionate about the subject, and it totally shone through when she
taught. It engaged me at a level that I hadn’t seen in my education before, or
since. Now, I kept on with computer science when I realized I’d rather take a
math test than write an essay—yet here I am, writing essays effectively one to
two times a week for my blog. Go figure.

One of the things I loved about sociology was the study of
people in aggregate. The sociology of gender; social norms and mores; deviance;
and community. Linking that to video games it’s clear, especially in the MMO
space, that community is an extremely important part. The Internet has changed
what a community effectively could be, by eliminating geographical boundaries. People
often mention the reason they still play WoW is because of their guild, or
their community.

A social unit of
any size is important to note. A community can be your family, your guild, your
server, your game as a whole, the entire gamut of gamers. It can also be
aligned with ideas, such as feminist gamers, LGBT gamers, and Christian gamers;
all sub-communities of both gamers and their respective shared values.
Communities are important, because they shape, validate, and reinforce
identity. When communities clash, the results can be illuminating, and/or
infuriating.

But at what size
does the idea of community become useless to the common person?

In a guild—even a
large one with over 1,000 members—there’s a sense of camaraderie, and a set of
shared rules, enforced by the guild officers. Sure, you get sub-communities,
like the raiders, the questers, the pet collectors, and so on, but there’s
still a shared purpose and commonality to the guild as a whole.

Even at a
server-level, there can be a pretty tight-knit community. A friend of mine
recently moved to the Alliance faction on US-Proudmoore in WoW, and commented
that people were, “so damned friendly on this server, it gives me the creeps.”
I’m proud of my server community. Proudmoore is the unofficial LGBT-friendly
server in WoW, so there’s a large contingent of like-minded folks. If you go to
Trade or General, people shut down homophobic commentary pretty quickly.

Numbers, yo.

According to Realm Pop, Proudmoore has
154,548 Alliance characters (the server itself is the 10th most
populous realm in all of the US). I have absolutely no data to back this next
assertion up, but if we assume the average player has 5 characters on the
server, we’re talking about 30,000 people making up a community with a very
strong identity. Probably less than that given how many of those characters are
probably inactive, so maybe 10,000 to 15,000?

But Proudmoore
has its trolls as well. In fact, I would argue that the larger a community, the
less homogenous that community will be. You see this every day on the Internet,
where even in the echo chamber that is Twitter you have verbally violent
dissent. The community of MMO bloggers in which I participate in has polite
disagreement and spats every now and then. While differences of opinion are
fantastic (because otherwise, how do we grow?), disruptions to a community can
be stressful.

Within a small,
tight-knit community, it’s easy to enforce those social mores. If you can’t
work with a person because they’re being disruptive, excommunicating the
douchecanoe is a relatively simple thing to perform when you’re talking about a
community of 30 – 50 people. Or even just chastising them. For a server, if
most of the server is onboard with certain expectations and someone deviates
from them, the rebuke is often swift. Hell, when you look at North American
society as a whole, which is a MASSIVE community, and take something like sex
versus violence, the majority of the opinion swings in a certain direction. But
you have dissenters. And as time passes, the social norms about sex and
violence are changing, albeit slowly.

Change can occur
much more quickly in small communities, as well. How much easier is it to get
your close friends and family on board with your opinion on ladies in gaming
versus the Internet at large? But in those small communities, homogeneity also seems
to be king. While a large community such as North America can tolerate
dissenting opinions, because there are enough members to form sub-communities,
a tiny one like your family may not be able to cope with 20% of their members (e.g.:
you) having a different opinion or outlook (e.g.: being atheist, or gay, or a
gamer).

Oy, WoW community (not all WoW community). This is why it's hard as shit to defend you sometimes.
— Tzufit (@soetzufit) June 11, 2014

Tzufit recently
tweeted about the “WoW community”. While it is a large community, it’s hardly
monolithic. Quite similar to a large city, actually. If you look at London, or
Sydney, or Vancouver, or Seattle, while certain, shall we say, stereotypes
hold, there are still a ton of sub-communities within each city, and those
sub-communities are extremely diverse in their opinions. And it’s possible to
be part of multiple communities at once, including ones that don’t generally
overlap.

So is it useful
to talk about the WoW community as an entity given how massive it is?

I think it
depends on the context. If you’re talking about people who are playing WoW, and
trends around the game, such as GearScore, or requiring ilvls higher than the
content you’d be running, or general attitude in LFR, I think it’s a useful
entity to discuss, as that is the commonality between those people—and frankly,
I might be pushing that limit considering the fact that WoW itself has a number
of sub-games, such as Pet Battling.

I think if you’re
talking about a subset of jerks on the Internet yelling at someone because they
didn’t like what was posted about WoW, but you have just as many folks saying, “Hooray,
good for you!” I don’t think you can attribute it to that particular community.
Not to mention, as Ghostcrawler once pontificated on at great length, the
silent majority of people who just sit, read, watch, and play. Or they don’t
even read or watch; they just play, and aren’t participating in the community
outside the game, splitting your playerbase into a small, vocal minority and a
large, mute (and effectively invisible) majority.

But at the same
time, I also don’t think you can just wave your hands and say, “Nope, not our
problem.” It’s similar to the post I made before about
underrepresented people in games. If you are silent, nothing will change,
so calling people out on their behaviour is probably necessary, or at least
vocally disagreeing with it. Which is hilariously ironic, since that’s
precisely what the folks who are yelling at someone because they didn’t like
what was posted is doing. But that’s how change occurs in a community: someone
or some people pushing for said change.

In my opinion,
the word community gets bandied about a lot, but I think its usage masks just
how large and disjointed WoW’s sub-communities are. Treating that many people
in the same way as you’d treat your family or your guild isn’t really useful
for discussion. Rather, I’d treat the WoW community as an online society, or gesellschaft. It’s
certainly large enough.

"Minor sidepoint, but that green section (male) on the pie chart is larger than the purple section (female). How do you figure there are more female characters?"~Derp. Good call, not sure what I did either. Today on "Talarian needs more sleep..."

"There's a significant difference between disagreement (polite or otherwise) and people just being assholes."~ Agreed 100%

I think communities come in sizes as large as WoW. I think maybe you're trying to question at what size the definition becomes useless? And to me the answer seems: at no size is community as a descriptor useless.

Compared to rival communities, like say Eve Online, we can definitely point to many, many things WoW players all have in common and which unify their ideas, purpose, and activities. As far as what gamers permit within their communities (such as bigotry or descrimination), I think holding the group accountable is exactly what communities are designed to do. The group is responsible for what goes inside it, because if it goes on it's because its permitted. Otherwise we get into questioning whether the group has lost control of itself or is being controlled by outsiders who force these things upon them. I definitely think an argument can be made for that, but I tend to err on the side of the argument that makes the community accountable. it's hard to say, and that gets kinda complex to figure out. I'm just brainstorming the possibilities. What do you think?

How to reconcile differences within the community is a whole other question. But I think communities have differences and divisions, and that doesn't make them less of a community.